Swarthmoor Hall, Ulverston

Swarthmoor Hall was the home of George Fox and his wife Margaret Fell. Fox was the most prominent Quaker leader in seventeenth-century England whose Journal, a kind of diary of his travels, still makes excellent reading. I admire him a great deal, believing him to be a saved man. He reacted against his age’s errors- state interference in personal faith and outward shows of piety without inward witness. Puritan worship at the state churches he considered to be mere formalism and hypocrisy; he had few qualms about interrupting such Lord’s Day gatherings and denouncing the clergy paid by compulsory tithes.

Whereas much modern Quakerism is a bereft of Fox’s evangelical zeal, Swarthmoor Hall was home to a godly man who suffered much for Biblical truth. He knew Oliver Cromwell, having the courage to challenge the great Protector about his use of violence and support for state churches. He told him to “lay down his crown at the feet of Jesus". Fox had a magnetic personality, but he was a humourless, often disagreeable man who much vexed the Commonwealth saints. Like his grey, rendered house, his grim exterior hid a vigorous and appealing interior. A portrait of the man he so often rebuked now hangs in his house and the balcony from which he preached in the 1650s still exists.